I am drawing two separate paths that are 'circular' but I need their rounded corners to align evenly to eachother. I feel there must be a simpler way to do this than manually adjusting each point and pivot controls until it 'looks right'. Is there a way to do this automatically?

If I understand it in the right way, you may create the black shape in front of the cyan shape and give it a white stroke that becomes the white band (you may place it behind the fill), or you may Object>Path>Offset Path with the band width as the offset, then change the offset path colour to white.

I don't want the white border. I separated them for the purpose of this post. I want the blue path that runs along the black to align and shape EVENLY to the black one and then combine them but remain two separate objects.